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It’s Friday when Till jingles his car keys in front of him and booms: “Get ready. We’re going out.”
Ivan blinks up at him. “You got your driver’s license yesterday.”
“And?”
“And I don’t want my car in a dumpster yard today.”
“Fuck off.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and shoves a pair of clothes on him. “Just. Do as I say. Need you out by five.”
“I always do as you say,” Ivan says, and bites his fingers. And—
Nothing happens.
He stares back at Till, who’s already shuffling away, muttering to himself, and there's no shout, no yelp, not even a punch.
The clothes slip out of his hands.
“Where are we going?”
Till, almost driving past a red light, abruptly stops. There's a divot between his brows that Ivan wants to reach and smooth out. “To eat. At the diner you like.”
He doesn't really have a diner he likes. Till likes the one around this corner, where they give a bunch of ketchup sachets and pepper. The food is over-salted and borderline undercooked, and hardly anyone eats there. It's apocalyptic. He doesn't think the meat is FDA-approved. They have hard water. The food is radioactive; the washroom reeks of biohazard.
Anyway.
“That’s nice,” he says. “You were supposed to take a left from that signal we crossed ten minutes ago.”
Till swerves the car and forces the brake.
“Why,” he fumes, “did you not mention this ten minutes ago?”
“You’d have crashed into a tree there.” He fiddles with the seatbelt and asks, “Do you want me to take over?”
“No,” Till replies flippantly and takes a rash U-turn. Some pedestrians on the sidewalk take ten steps back. “Don’t you dare do shit.”
“Okay,” he concedes. “You just drove past a red light. There's a cop after you.”
The brakes make him leap forward. A cop taps on Till’s window.
An hour later, the car ends up with fifteen dents after Till’s parking attempt. The diner’s doors screech open ominously smelling of anchovies.
They sit at the farthest corner of the world where the AC is faulty and anchovies are under the floorboards.
“What do you want?” Till demands. He's holding the menu upside down. It sends a flutter in his chest.
Ivan rests his head in his arms and blinks at him. “Anything you like.”
Till squints at him. A waiter pops up from under their table and twirls his moustache. He drops a basket of ketchup sachets on the table and asks, “What can I get for you?”
Till looks between them and says, “Give us a second.”
The waiter starts taking the ketchup sachets out one by one, like a countdown.
MIZI
2:05 p.m.
Me: we are at his favourite diner which I lied about and said it's my favourite too because what's his is mine and now he's trying to order something that I'd like and he keeps pointing at just about everything and asks if I like it
Me: I said yes to everything and he’s begging me to have opinions of my own outside of him and we stare into each other's eyes and he's so beautiful I tell him to spit on me and he orders something I don't think was in the English dictionary
Me: they get the orders mixed up with who knows who because we’re the only people in a five-mile radius of this diner and now I'm sitting with what looks like fermented foot
Me: he fed me with his fork
Me: tried a bit of my food before feeding me and now he's retching in a corner
Me: I want him to tear my clothes off
Till ends up eating the fermented foot, then spends half an hour in the washroom. Ivan sings Baby Shark through the huge crack and Till insists on taking some strange detour through the winding roads that will probably land them in jail.
At least he gets a packet of gas station chips. And a basket of ketchup sachets. He shoves some in his pockets.
“Are you sure you have the GPS fixed correctly?” He asks. It's the third time they've passed that dying tree there.
“Yes,” Till hisses back. He's squinting at the road. A bead of sweat rolls down his neck. “Pass me a chip.”
Ivan shoves two in his mouth. “Better than whatever you had there.”
Till aggressively chews and takes another turn at the same conjecture they passed ten minutes ago. “This was supposed to be nice,” he mutters. “Why the fuck is there nothing nice out the window?”
“This is nice.” Ivan points at the dying tree. “Should I take a picture?”
Turns out, they were supposed to stop at a lake.
The lake in question is a dried-up tragedy, a shallow pond of water, full of sewage and possibly a brain-eating amoeba, on the banks of which there's a gang of grown men blasting If You're Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands at a volume he’d be able to hear from his home.
One of them, nearly naked, a jacked grown man, waves at them and shouts, “Join us!”
Till glares at them. “Motherfucker.”
Ivan sits on a rock by the lake or the lack thereof, and shoves his mouth with chips. “I think it’s nice.”
Till groans.
Me: he's so cute
Me: [an attachment]
Me: he's trying to fish my bag of chips out from the pond
Me: he fell inside
Mizi: please get a grip
“Just. One last try,” Till says, and pushes the pedal. He reeks of sewage and anchovies and the natural musk of a man whose last three meals were mistakes, and Ivan wishes they didn't have a change of clothing in the car from the last time Till ended up blowing something. “There has to be something good around this corner. I feel it.”
Ivan chews on the brand new packet of Berry Ranch Pinky Pie Chips New & Improved and watches the road. Not a single passerby. There's a construction site ahead. A landfill. More dead trees. The GPS is screaming.
“That’s what you said two traffic lights ago,” he points out.
Till ignores him. They run a red light.
A police car is right there.
“Isn’t that,” Till wonders aloud, petrified, “the guy who fined us forty thousand won three hours ago?”
“Seems so,” Ivan answers, licking the crumbs off his fingers.
“Act normal,” he says, and presses the pedal hard.
“You just ran a red light.”
The sirens go off. Till floors it.
Me: was it casual when he broke several traffic rules to land us in jail so that he could spend quality time with me away from prying eyes smelling of anchovies and sewage and drenched in sweat
Me: bricked
Mizi: can't bail u out rn sorry !!
Mizi: sua n I are on a date night
Mizi: And they gave us a ton of ketchup I think I'm in love
Mizi: also I think they're cooking people
Mizi: enjoy ur day !!
Me: do you think if I touched his thigh right now he'd crash the car
“You’re making this worse,” Ivan says, clicking pictures of dead trees and police cars. “We’re going to jail.”
“No we’re not,” Till insists, gripping the wheel. A cop shouts at him from a distance.
To Mizi, he texts: it's endearing he thinks he'll escape the police by breaking a few more laws of the land.
Mizi, bless her heart, empathetically begs: please don't get arrested.
Till takes a sharp turn into the awkwardly placed woods, and the car almost turns over. They are now off-road, in a sedan.
“Till—”
“I got this,” he yells. The car bounces. Ivan takes a few more clicks of the dead, wilting trees. A squirrel jumps over the window and points and laughs at them.
Till panics.
The car slams through a fence.
As it turns out, the fence is a government property. They are now technically trespassing on federal land. Till rests his head on the steering wheel as Ivan crawls out of the car to check the signboard they dented.
“Unauthorised personnel prohibited,” he reads off, “violators will be prosecuted.” In fine writing: “Hazardous Material Site. Twenty-four-seven surveillance.”
They look at each other.
“Oh,” Till says.
“Oh,” Ivan parrots.
The loudspeaker blares: STAND WHERE YOU ARE. DO NOT MOVE.
A helicopter whirrs over his head.
They tackle Till immediately. He squirms around and then just lies face pressed to the ground. Ivan procures his packet of Berry Ranch Pinky Pie Chips and dumps it in his mouth.
“You’re trespassing on government property,” says the poor cop.
Ivan chews slowly. “He really didn't mean to.”
“Do you have any idea,” the cop snaps, “how many laws you've broken today?”
Till, caked with dirt, mutters out: “Arrest me. Please.”
It's nice that they have a list of things they've been charged with, Ivan thinks. So meticulous. Reckless driving, evading arrest, running multiple red lights, speeding through multiple red lights, property damage, trespassing on federal land, et cetera, et cetera.
So adventurous. They get shoved at the back of the police car and Till puts his head in his hands. The scenery is somehow exactly what Till had envisioned.
“We’re getting arrested,” he says, a touch hysterically.
Ivan smiles.
Me: he gets so unbelievably hot when his life falls apart
Me: what if I reach and lick his sweat what then
The inmates are an assortment of people he’d never thought could exist together. There's a ripped guy in the corner, Bob-something, tattooed head-to-toe, charged with stealing a bucket of glitter ice cream. He broods in a corner and pats Till’s back and suspiciously looks like he belongs to the lake-side gang. The other guy over there is charged with stealing a shopping cart. Joe here is charged with singing too loud in public, shirtless. Lazare flipped off a judge. Some guy there bribed a kid with a cent. One there has stolen traffic cones.
They fit right in.
From the corner of his eye, Till murmurs, “Oh my God.”
“You don't want to be here,” Ivan effectively deduces an hour in. They're going to keep them overnight, and they have one phone call.
Till’s curled up in a corner. “No shit,” he snaps back.
“I don't think I've seen you this enthusiastic to drive around the city.”
He gets a glare, so he walks to Till and stares down at him. There's a leaf in his hair and he's nicked his right cheek. Ivan wipes it with his thumb and he tumbles back. It's endearing.
“What was that for?” Till quips.
Ivan shrugs, and settles beside him. Their shoulders touch. He's high off of it. “What was this for?” He asks instead.
Till shuffles awkwardly. He still carries himself the way he did in middle school. His fingers twitch when he's nervous, and he licks his lips when he's been caught.
“I,” he carefully begins, “thought you'd like it. We’d have gotten the cake by now. And. You're stuck here. With me. And your car crashed in the middle of nowhere.”
Ivan looks at him. “Till—”
“We were going to eat at the diner you like. And there’d be stupid green shit out the window so you'd click pictures from your shitty phone. You'd talk about the economy or the weather or something like that, and we'd get the cake, enough sugar to off a grown ass man, I'd drive us home and we'd sing the corny songs you like.” He rubs a hand over his face. “And now we're in jail.”
The world stops spinning. His heart climbs his chest and lodges itself in his throat. One, two, three. Till clenches his jaw when he's frustrated. He wants to take a bite out of it. Gnaw on his arm fondly. Like a hamster.
Ivan looks over Till’s head, where Bob is trying to cheer, and his snaggletooth pierces his lip. “Why?”
Till snaps his head at him. “What why? It's your birthday, asshole. Adoption day. Whatever.”
Ivan swallows. This is uncharted territory. “You. Really didn't have to,” he says, grappling with what he has.
“The fuck does that mean?” Till demands. “I did because I wanted to. Don't be ungrateful. And it's not like any of that happened anyway. Don't make it a big deal.”
If you asked me, I’d pluck lice out of your head and eat it only because they touched you, Ivan thinks. I could bottle your scent forever and patent it to wear behind my ears like perfume. If you got locked up in a cell forever I'd fight guards for you just so you know I care and barge in the cell so you'd punch the daylights out of me. There's my love stuck between the gaps of your teeth. I love you, even when you don't say it back. Do you understand?
He doesn't let a word of that seep into his voice. “Till,” he blurts instead, giddy, and bites his shoulder.
There's no forgiveness in this. He's in love, so help him god; he's in love.
Anyway, he picks the lock. Till’s jaw hits the floor.
“You’re telling me,” he seethes, “you could do that the entire time and you—”
Ivan shrugs, and holds his hand the entire way out. The guards watch them deadpan, and the officer snores on the chair. The inmates cheer at the bruise on Till’s shoulder.
A guard yells behind them: “Hey—hey!” And Ivan drags Till out, sprinting and panting, till the guy gives up. He can't breathe. It's so cold.
Till pulls his hand, pointing to the sky. Ivan stumbles back.
“What’s that?” He asks, bewildered, Ivan follows his trail of sight, to the sky, and—
A meteor is tumbling down the sky. One, then another, the whole sky is a shower, one by one, and his heart beats out of his chest. He’s eight again, flipping through the fattest astronomy book in the library, hanging onto each word, marking a date in his calendar to sneak Till out of his house in the middle of the night. He's fallen asleep through the night and he misses the next one because he's sick, and the one after because he's been made a standing mannequin at a fancy party.
He looks at Till, and back to the sky, and falls to the pavement. Till flops beside him. The light reflects in his eyes.
Ivan reaches his hand into his pockets.
He hands Till a ketchup sachet, and rests his head on his shoulder. Surely he understands?